Scientists Developing Directed Energy Laser Weapon ‘Death Star’ to Destroy Asteroids

Didn’t Tesla think of this first?

A team at University of California is working on a planetary defense project they’ve dubbed the “De-Star” — Direct Energy System for Targeting Asteroids and exploRation (they apparently had to work really hard for the final “R” in that knickname there).

Sounds like Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program… or just the movie Star Wars. The laser weapon would be used to protect planet Earth from rogue asteroids by vaporizing them.

A smaller version would fly alongside asteroids and provide a last line of defense should the object make a run toward Earth.

The only problem with the system is that the team would need a decent heads up to prevent disaster, and NASA recently proved to the world that two-story wide meteors could enter Earth’s atmosphere completely undetected by the agency, despite the fact that they have an entire program that’s supposed to do just that.

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